The present invention relates to gun racks and more particularly to gun racks adapted to mount long guns such as shotguns within the passenger compartments of automotive vehicles.
Modern-day police forces are often equipped with patrol cars having "riot" guns, i.e., shotguns adapted to police purposes.
The preferred mounting arrangement involves a muzzle down mounted position of the shotgun, above the floor of the passenger compartment alongside the driver's seat. This out-of-sight positioning is preferred for security purposes, as well as to achieve a less intimidating presence.
Another preferred feature is the mounting of the shotgun so as to allow usability of the passenger side to allow for the presence of a second police officer during patrol.
Gun racks for such purposes have heretofore been mounted to the tunnel and adjacent floor contours of the police cars. Since such contours vary widely in differing models of cars, each gun rack has heretofore involved a custom fabrication of a mounting support, which custom fabrication is relatively costly.
Further, when a police department changes the cars in its fleet, typically a scrappage of the existing mounting frames was necessitated as well as the fabrication of an entirely new series of racks.
Desirably, such a gun rack should be adaptable to mounting to tunnel and adjacent floor configurations of the passenger compartment of widely varying size and contour, and also be adaptable to shotguns of differing models and lengths such that a single standardized gun rack may be employed. This enables racks to be manufactured at low cost and in large volumes, and to enable remounting and reuse in differing models of police cars.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a standardized gun rack which is adaptable for the mounting of shotguns in automotive passenger compartments, and which is adapted to widely varying automotive passenger compartment tunnel and floor contours.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide such gun rack which is also adaptable to varying shotgun configurations.